Uganda’s defence minister said Friday its troops would remain in Somalia, despite growing uncertainty over the future of the African Union mission, under a pre-existing bilateral agreement.
Somalia has been battling Al-Shabaab terrorists for around two decades.
Uganda has roughly 4,500 troops in the country under the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), the leading force supporting the Somali army, and a further 2,000 under a bilateral agreement, a military source told AFP.
However, the future of AUSSOM has been thrown into doubt after Washington announced it would end payments to the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), which provides crucial logistics to the mission, by the year’s end.
‘Arrangement to evolve’
On Friday, the Ugandan Defence Minister Kiryowa Kiwanuka told AFP that “Uganda is going to remain in Somalia”, declining to give further details but indicating its presence would be outside AUSSOM.
“The arrangement that we are going to have on how we remain in Somalia is going to evolve, but… we already have a force there on bilateral arrangement with Somalia,” he said.
Mogadishu and Kampala signed a bilateral agreement at the end of 2024 over the deployment of an unspecified number of Ugandan army troops from 2025.
Another military official, who requested anonymity, told AFP that they understand other nations – including Kenya, Ethiopia and Egypt – intend to keep troops in Somalia in 2027.
Kiwanuka was speaking to AFP at the end of the Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF) meeting in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, which had also discussed the fallout over funding shortfalls.
‘Orderly, coordinated exit’
“The stability of Somalia, the stability of Africa, affects us, so we must find the resources,” Kiwanuka said.
Defence ministers from the countries that make up AUSSOM – Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda – and Somalia have stressed the need for an “orderly, coordinated” exit of the AU mission in order to hand over to Somali forces.
It comes as deeply fragmented Somalia faces yet another political crisis, after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s decision to change the constitution in March ahead of planned elections, decried as a power grab by his opponents.
